I was looking at a neat-looking task manager/time tracker called Thymer, and I like the way they have a little fun with the signup:
A recent tweet by Dave winer made me realize I had completely missed Technorati launching a new strategy.
Dave tweeted this:
davewiner: In the new scheme Technorati rates my blog a 0 on a scale of 1 to 1000. Gulp. http://r2.ly/pe2g
I went and looked: /Message now has an authority of 592, which is not bad. And it looks like a whole lot of blogs that had been higher ranked have tumbled from the list ahead of me, since /Message is now ranked 1290, and a few weeks ago it was around 6000.
[via Technorati to change how it measures bloggers’ influence | VentureBeat by Dean Takahashi]Technorati is about to make some big changes to the way it measures how important bloggers are. That means its top-100 list of the most influential bloggers is going to change. Some bloggers may be delighted by the changes, while others who drop in the rankings may howl in protest.
Basically, the company is going to reduce the costs of indexing the blogosphere and reporting the results on its Technorati.com site, which is a major blog search engine. It is not going to index the blogosphere just for the sake of saying it can do so. It is also going to put more emphasis into its business which pays the bills: the Technorati Media ad network, which serves ads to more than 400 sites, not just Technorati.com
“We were spending way too much money,” said Richard Jalichandra, who became chief executive of the San Francisco company in 2007 (see his guest post). “This is a turnaround situation. The company had business, but it was in a small amount of trouble. The company was conceived for a different kind of Internet. Now, besides blogs, there is Twitter, social networking, and the real-time web.”
The processing requirements for the index have grown dramatically as the blogosphere has blossomed into hundreds of millions of blogs. And of the 300 million plus blogs out there, only a fraction of them are updated often.
In the past, Technorati used about six months worth of data to determine its authority rankings. Now it will use a few weeks, but it will capture the slices of data more frequently to keep up with real-time changes. That’s based on the notion that 90 percent of the searches yield information that is less than six months old. In a way, Technorati is dropping out of the race with Google and other search companies that are trying to build the infrastructure necessary to capture everything that happens on the web.
Technorati is also going to emphasize “relevancy.” The index will try to capture changes in the blogosphere that are relevant to people who are searching through the blogs. The results should deliver relevant results from authoritative sources, not just the latest inane Tweets. Technorati will divide the index into more relevant categories, such as sports blogs.
Although Technorati's motivations for changing the algorithm underneath Authority and Rank is financial, the end result is a pair of metrics that are more real time, and may be a better indication of the 'real-time influence' of the blogs measured. By real-teim influence I mean the likely influence that the blog has had on recent readers in the recent past.
This could be even more of an effect if and when Technorati starts to incorporate Twitter references into its measures, as the CEO, Jalichandra, says they plan to do.
I am not tremendously organized. I am what is called a 'scruffy' when it comes to personal organization:
[via 3 Life Meta Hacks: Erosion, Streams, And Piles]Scruffies don't organize everything: they are "data-driven", using their environment to channel their work, like the piles of things I leave on my desk to which I will eventually turn my attention, or the electronic stickies in which I clip things. "Neats", on the other hand, use a small number of "explicit coordinating structures" -- organizers, to-do lists, and in-boxes -- to determine what to do next.
So I may not be the right person to talk about organizing the myriad links, clippings, and chunks of information that seem to fill every corner of our digital lives.
For several years, I used 37 Signals' Backpack application as a tool to manage all sorts of extraneous information, and after fiddling with all sorts of other tools, I am still using it, especially for two things:
Anyway, without a deep dive (see Backpack: A digital version of a miscellaneous drawer for detail) I have found Backpack a free form sort of place, where I can create 'pages' with all sorts of links, pictures, lists, and notes, and basically keep track of a lot of junk.
I have started to use a variety of specialized apps for certain things, like AwardWallet, which keeps track of all the travel loyalty programs for me, updating mileage automatically and notifying me about expiration dates.
But what I haven't found is a more sophisticated solution that allows the combination of the automation of AwardWallet and the free form flexibility of Backpack.
I think that's what the folks at Springpad have tried to create, but for me -- at least given the amount of time that I am willing to spend customizing things -- it falls short of the promise.
As a simple example, imagine I read a reveiw of fried chicken restaurants in the NY Times. My current approach is to simply create a Backpack page called NY Restaurants, add a note, and paste the addresses in, like so:
At some point in the future, I will open the page, and decide where to have dinner.
The flow is totally different with Springpad. First, I might have been using the Springpad bookmarklet to capture the text associated with the restaurants:
And if I did that, fine, it would be more or less like the snippet I saved on Backpack. However, Springpad has a specialized app built into it for restaurants, so If I want to go down that route, I need to copy the restaurants one by one, using a more specialized interface, like this:
This integrates with Yelp, has ratings, links, and a rafter of other information. It is mouch more sophisticated around the matter of sharing, too.
The Springpad people are going down a completely different road, based on a very sensible branding approach. An internet celebrity like Gary Vanerchuk can integrate his wine selections into Springpad, so that I can add his recommendations to my Springpad wine wishlist:
In a similar fashion, they are co-marketing with famous cooks around recipes, and they could get into a dozen verticals.
But for me, each of these verticals represents a different decision to make. If I am already heavily invested in using a wine app, like Adegga, I am unlikely to switch. I personally have dozens of recipes in my Epicurious account, and I am unwilling to transfer to Springpad to use its marginally better sharing.
And lastly, for a simple free form piece of music, that is a breeze in Backpack, I have to laboriously create a table using a tool that seems designed to tabulate numbers. So hard that I never even finished a single song:
In the final analysis, I may be judging Springpad using the wrong approach, which was to see how well it allowed me to do what I am used to do already. If I had been willing to drop my preconceptions, and work the way Springpad was steering me, I might have been happier with it, at least after a few weeks. But I am just too set in my ways, and scruffy. I really just want a simple and flexible tool that isn't very specialized at anything, instead of a bag of very specialized vertical tools sharing a common -- but very complex -- user interaction framework.
I have fallen into a Twitter rabbit hole.
For the past few hours I have not been getting the status updates of the 900+ folks that I am following:
Meanwhile, when I check if these folks have been tweeting, they have.
So, for some reason, Twitter is blocking tweets from reaching me. But not @mentions, which I seem to be getting. And my pal Andre (@andrerib) tells me he is seeing my tweets.
I opened Twitter on the web when this first started and was informed I had 0 followers and 0 following, which I failed to capture. When I refreshed it was back to normal. Except for not having any tweets from my tweeps.
[update: back to zeroes again.
]
Anyone else fall into this hole?
[Update: Peter Kafka is reporting the same bug.]
The mess that is boiling out of the Obama administration's Recovery.gov website is laughable, considering the transparency and openness that Obama pledged to create.
Propublica is all over this:
[via Obama Administration Redacts Contract Details for Recovery.gov by Christopher Flavelle].
Back in July, a software company named Smartronix [1] landed an $18 million contract to build a Web site where taxpayers could easily track billions in federal stimulus money. It was just another part of the Obama administration’s ongoing effort to bring transparency to stimulus spending, we were told.
But it seems the drive for transparency doesn’t cover the contract itself.
After weeks of prodding by ProPublica and other organizations, the General Services Administration released copies of the contract and related documents that are so heavily blacked out they are virtually worthless.
And what did they black out? Identities of people who would be working on the project, what is being built, and how it will be built.
I was amazed to discover that the details of how the site is planned to integrate to external services like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter was completely redacted.
I mean I know that Twitter is important, but not that important.
Many others have chimed in on how bad a precedent this sets, and what a bad start this suggests for the Obama administration:
Clay Johnson, the director of the Sunlight Labs [10] project at the Sunlight Foundation [11], called the level of redaction in the documents remarkable.“I think the people have a right to know what their money is being spent on,” he said. “We still don’t really know what the government’s buying here, other than that it’s a Web site.”
The criticism from the Sunlight Foundation is notable. Smartronix says in its proposal that it has “engaged the Sunlight Foundation as advisers on government transparency [12],” adding that the foundation “is willing to advise Team Smartronix on transparency [2].”
Johnson disputed that characterization. He said that while he had spoken with one of Smartronix’s subcontractors and agreed to have Sunlight listed as an adviser, he had never spoken with anyone from the company itself and isn’t involved in the contract.
“We’re willing to advise anybody on transparency,” said Johnson.
This looks interesting. Rolling out Brightkite 2.0.
I have been thinking a great deal about the application of the open follower model (a la Twitter) to the emerging social business. My intuitive sense has been that there are many ways that people use Twitter, and these could be discovered by various kinds of statistical analysis, but otherwise the truth of what is going on may be concealed by the buzz of many people talking all at once.
Bernardo Huberman, Daniel Romero, and Fang Wu published a report early this year (see Twitter Under The Microscope: Huberman, Romero and Wu) about Twitter usage, and discovered a key reality: the apparent, superficial social network based on following and followers conceals a deeper, sparser social network, where relationship really matters and where the most critical communications take place.
[from Social Networks That Matter: Twitter Under The Microscope by Bernardo Huberman, Daniel Romero, and Fang Wu]In conclusion, even when using a very weak definition of “friend” (i.e., anyone who a user has directed a post to at least twice) we find that Twitter users have a very small number of friends compared to the number of followers and followees they declare. This implies the existence of two different networks: a very dense one made up of followers and followees, and a sparser and simpler network of actual friends. The latter proves to be a more influential network in driving Twitter usage since users with many actual friends tend to post more updates than users with few actual friends. [emphasis mine.] On the other hand, users with many followers or followees post updates more infrequently than those with few followers or followees.
Many people, including scholars, advertisers and political activists, see online social networks as an opportunity to study the propagation of ideas, the formation of social bonds and viral marketing, among others. This view should be tempered by our findings that a link between any two people does not necessarily imply an interaction between them. As we showed in the case of Twitter, most of the links declared within Twitter were meaningless from an interaction point of view. Thus the need to find the hidden social network; the one that matters when trying to rely on word of mouth to spread an idea, a belief, or a trend.
This accords well with my intuitions, and suggests that in business, just as in the larger open social context, a small number of relationships will be the place where the most important work gets done, as companies begin to adopt open follower social tools.
A more recent study has been published that slices the Twittersphere from a different angle:
[via Study Reveals Two Types of Twitter Users]In a study of Twitter, a microblogging service used by millions of people from high school students to national elected officials, Mor Naaman and Jeffrey Boase found that 80 percent of regular users are “meformers,” people who use the platform to post updates on their everyday activities, social lives, feelings, thoughts and emotions. The remaining 20 percent – “informers” – share information, have larger social networks and are more interactive with their followers.
In their report, the Rutgers researchers examined several questions and teased answers from the data:
[via Is it Really About Me? Message Content in Social Awareness Streams]
- What types of messages are commonly posted and how does message type relate to other variables?
- What are the differences between users in terms of the types and diversity of messages that they usually post?
- How are these differences between users’ content practices related to other user characteristics?
The researchers discovered nine categories of messaged (see below) but four were the dominant ones: Information Sharing, 12%; Opinions/Complaints, 24%; Statements and Random Thoughts, 25%; and "Me Now", which are mood, location, and status updates, 40%.
The researchers used cluster analysis to find that there are really two clusters of users, who can be typified by the distribution of the various sorts of tweets they make. These are "Meformers", who produce almost 50% "Me Now" messages, and "Informers", who produce about 50% Information Sharing messages. (Note: these Informers are really wahat I was talking about when I coined Onfovores.)
Meformers make up 80% of the population, while Informers are 20%. Informers have more friends and followers than Meformers, and have a higher degree of mentions by other users in messages. This suggests that Informers would play a stronger leadership role in a business setting, shaping the discussion about events, helping to set context about what is more important, and so on.
But the role of Meformers shouldn't be discounted. First of all, a great deal of status updates -- 'Just left the budget meeting' or 'push the new UI to production' -- isn't just about the individual, but about actions they are taking in pursuit of work-related aims. In the open follower model this get passed along as a 'Me Now' message, but it isn't navel gazing: it's social signaling about work activities.
More importantly, every one engages in both 'characters' to some extent, although it is very bipolar. It appears that women are more likely to lean toward Meformage than men, but just a bit.
All sociality is based on "me first", but not in an egocentric way. We are defined by our connections to others, and the first gift we give is a tale of ourselves. And this seems to have occurred to the researchers as well:
Note that although the Meformers’ self focus might be characterized by some as self-indulgent, these messages may play an important role in helping users maintain relationships with strong and weak ties.
Or to indicate the status of work.
My sense is that business needs a mix of these sorts, and it could very well be that the natural 80/20 split that the researchers discovered in their research is a good mix for business. We might as well assume that the natural order of things has evolved to meet some deep social needs.
Maybe we need 20% of the tribe scanning the horizon for prey and predators, tracking the stars and clouds. Meanwhile, the other 80% are working on tools, setting up the tents, milking the goats, and drying the corn.
In a 2007 study on global risks, a group working on behalf of the World Economic Forum identified a collection of highly interconnected risk factors, and explored various scenarios in which these factors often influenced each other and in some cases amplified the effects of others.
The scenarios worked through are chilling, such as a world pandemic which leads to heightened militarism and authoritarian controls lead to drastic shifts in global geopolitics. However, their second scenario, "Out Of The Global Warming Frying Pan (And Into The Fiscal Fire)", shows the contribution of bottom-up social communication -- anti-government text messaging in China -- to the cascade of events leading to a global financial collapse.
Information asymmetry also plays a key role in this scenario, which illustrates the knock-on effects of a major shift in risk perception: namely, that climate change has arrived.Events in 2007 trigger an inflection point in global concern over the consequences of climate change.
First, massive inland flooding in South Asia resulting from a late monsoon leads to crop failure, as well as mass migrations. Tensions rise on the Bangladesh-India border as thousands flee humanitarian disaster. In the Americas, oil supply is still disrupted from 2007 tropical storms; an unprecedented cold snap in the north-east of the US leads to a spike in heating-fuel prices as domestic and local supplies are exhausted. Finally, figures released in December 2007 show an unprecedented spike in the global temperature of 1.5 degrees Celsius for the year as a whole.
China’s remarkable story of 28 years of economic growth – a Citigroup Global Capital Markets report (22 November 2006) predicts real GDP growth of 9.8% in 2007 and 10.7% in 2008 – is disturbed by awareness of environmental degradation and inequality between “many Chinas”. Some 150 million surplus rural workers drift between villages and cities by 2008, with many subsisting through part-time, low-paying jobs. This dislocation is masked by unreliable official figures, but eventually causes widespread civil unrest. In part due to the Beijing Olympics, the government is initially unable to calm demonstrations resulting from viral text-message campaigns. The protests seize the mood of global discontent and speak loudly on the issue of environmental degradation.In North America, public concern over climate change leapfrogs scientific consensus. High oil prices cause a pull back from US asset markets, bursting that country’s “housing bubble”. Popular discontent results in calls for radical action.
In the United States, legislators follow California's populist lead, establishing a national carbon trading scheme and creating industry incentives for conservation and alternative energy. In late 2008, the US administration releases a white paper entitled "From Addiction to Oil, to Blessed by Biofuel", signalling an enhanced focus in US energy policy on biofuels, particularly relevant to farming communities in the American Mid-West. The white paper wins political support both from “hawks” seeking US energy independence and those fearing climate change.
This policy response has the unintended consequence of setting up acute competition for productive land, between food, fuel, forests and fibre, with increased carbon sequestration and mining activities competing at the margin. Prices rise for agricultural commodities and land.
Meanwhile, China concludes the only practical option for the country’s future energy needs is nuclear, with coal-fired electricity as a bridging source. The government announces large-scale infrastructure spending and concludes negotiations with major suppliers of uranium.
While supply constraints and elevated demand keep oil prices high over 2007 to 2010, other developing countries follow China’s lead, and demand the right to sovereign control of the nuclear fuel cycle. This puts increasing pressure on the international nuclear non-proliferation regime, causing it to reach a tipping point. The continued failure of the international community to halt Iran’s nuclear programme leads that country to proclaim successful enrichment in early 2015.
Global concerns cause risk premiums to rise, and equities to slide. In North America and Europe, retirement funds are impacted. Governments are put under pressure to increase state financial support, causing fiscal positions to worsen, particularly in Europe. At the same time, the bursting of the US housing bubble and declines in equity markets cause private savings in major developed economies to rise – beginning a process of correcting long-standing global economic imbalances.
While you may not agree with all aspects of the scenario -- I am personally terrified that acceptance of climate change could precipitate such negative outcomes -- the point I am drawing your attention to is the use of text messaging as a social accelerant for change, which in this case hastens a scramble away from fossil fuels.
The authors make the case that the 'rapid spread of inaccurate or incomplete information can amplify the effects of the core risk event." They call this amplification an "Infodemic", where the power of a communication medium spreads tainted information and causes people to undertake actions that could spread and thereby increase the negative impacts of the core risk event. In the scenario explored above, the information being spread by the Chinese workers was possibly complete and accurate, however, and it still contributed to a dangerous, and perhaps inevitable, cascade of events.
We can sometimes act like well-intentioned bystanders who run into a burning house to save its occupants, and become trapped ourselves. Or worse, we escape in flames, and run down the street, setting the entire neighborhood on fire.
Social tools have the ability to amplify or counter the spread of information: it's built into their very nature. We can speed the spread of toxic info when the social system is an unreflecting mob, when mass broadcast prevails. However, when people act as people -- thinking beings -- and not like cattle, an budding infodemic can be cut short. However, to do so we have to rely on actual social relationships and social reputation.
In the case of the Chinese workers, what was really the case? Their growing perception of the pollution being caused by a rapidly growing, unchecked economic expansion was accurate, and their demands that something should be done was reasonable. So taking rational actions in an irrational context can lead to giant amplification, which can can lead to good or bad final outcomes depending on what transpires downstream.
So, what do we do if we want to be informed actors in this interconnected world? How can we avoid acting as a carrier of diseased information, an agent of the infodemic?
One solution is to rely on social scale. Consider the bearer of a snippet of news: do I know and trust her? Has she jumped off the cliff with the lemmings in the past? Or is she more likely to use her discerning judgment to weed out bad information?
We, the people living in the network, the living breathing nodes of this social universe, we are both the early warning system and the immune response to infodemics. No one will be better able than us to slow the spread of dangerous unchecked feedback in the world infosphere.
But the chance exists that we could unwittingly become an accelerant, mindlessly retweeting out partial information without considering the impact of our actions, and setting a larger fire than the one we are warning people about. It's even possible that striving to spread insight in an attempt to motivate others to do the right thing, like awareness of climate change, can lead to unintended consequences, especially in a world that seems intent on pretending it isn't happening. We could be like the text messaging Chinese in the Frying Pan/Fire scenario, who precipitate a global fiscal collapse because they wanted to stop pollution.
Typepad has been involved in a resocialization of their blogging platform, slowly and steadily rewiring the DNA of that mature platform into a vastly more interesting social tool.
Within the Typepad platform, users can follow each other in the now widely adopted open follower model (a la Twitter and Tumblr). More importantly, they have now begun to surface that richer social experience on the blogs. Here's a new widget on my blog, showing my followers and followings, and providing a hook to let people start following me within Typepad.
If you're interested in fooling with the new Typepad, start following me there.
The first Sidewiki comment that i know about on /Message was posted by Jeremiah Owyang, in response to Owyang Sees Email In Sidewiki Future. He responds to my comments on his own review of Sidewiki (see here, if you have Sidewiki installed).
I posted the comment link via Twitter, which is a builtin capability, and Jeremiah used the email sharing feature to ping me.
I still think that sidewiki should offer me some javascript to put into my blog, so that anyone -- even those who haven't installed the Google Toolbar -- could see the comments in place.
Steven Levy Talks Microsyntax, But Doesn't Use The Term
In a recent piece at Wired, Steven Levy talks about the microsyntactic conventions that make Twitter what it is:
I agree that Twitter is a weird company, too, Steven.
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